Entries tagged “science”

You know that thing where if you tap the top of someone else’s bottle of beer with the bottom of your bottle, their beer foams all over the place? Yeah, scientists have figured out why that happens.

After a sudden bump against a bottle’s mouth, back and forth movement of compression and expansion waves will cause bubbles to appear and quickly collapse.

The team’s investigation of beer bottle-fluid interactions demonstrated that the cavitation-induced break-up of larger ‘mother’ bubbles creates clouds of very small carbonic gas ‘daughter bubbles’ which grow and expand much faster than the larger mother-bubbles from which they split. The rapid expansion of these daughter bubbles gives the foam buoyancy.

Again, I am glad that scientists are spending their time doing important work.

To find out how many odors we can distinguish, researchers asked 26 participants to put their noses to the test. During each experiment, study participants were asked to smell the contents of three vials that the scientists had mixed themselves using 128 different odor molecules. Two of the vials contained the same mixture, while one did not. The participants’ task was to identify the odd mixture. Then, using the statistics obtained during the tests, the researchers were able to determine that people can distinguish two odors when their components differ by more than half.

Based on the smells of the homeless in the NYC subway, I’m guessing we can perceive much more than 1 trillion.

The moral of the story? The world is full of potential naturalists, Winterton says. More and more people using high-quality cameras that capture the kind of detail scientists need for identification, and they are sharing these photos online.

“There’s thousands of images a minute uploaded on Flickr,” he says. “I think there are many more discoveries forthcoming, particularly as more people are getting out into the field.”

Kind of an ugly looking bug, but I’m sure there’s someone out that would fed him honey and nightshade, keep him warm…love him…

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies — comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

Clearly, Hoover thinks terrestrial contamination is unlikely. However, contamination, no matter how unlikely, is a more mundane explanation than extraterrestrial life, and Occam’s Razor will always shave very closely here. We have to be very, very clear that contamination was impossible before seriously entertaining the idea that these structures are space-borne life.

And check out the Journal of Cosmology’s web site…it’s like they stepped into the WABAC Machine and landed in 1995.

Beattie’s steps to the perfect handshake, for both men and women, are: use the right hand; a complete grip and a firm squeeze (but not too strong); a cool and dry palm; approximately three shakes, with a medium level of vigor, held for no longer than two to three seconds.